Upon watching this film for the first time, even in the shorter 166m version that was for a long time the only one available anywhere with English subtitles, one is left drained, a quite literal mental wreck. Even those versed in the seminal works of Yoshida’s contemporaries, Oshima and Imamura, will be unprepared for this. That his work still remains unavailable to the English speaking world, barely mentioned in any major film guide or tome, is one of the greatest oversights of accepted film reference literature. If he only made this one film, Yoshida would be recognised as a giant.

Essentially the film relates the story of the famous Japanese anarchist Sakae Osugi, who was killed by the authorities soon after the Tokyo earthquake of 1923, aged 38. It tells his story through his three women; his wife, Yasuko, his current lover, Noe Ito, who was killed with him, and Itsuko, who tries unsuccessfully to kill him in 1916. His story is inter-cut with that of two students in modern day Tokyo, who discuss the merits or otherwise of free love and Osugi’s life and times.

And that’s not even scratching the surface! Critics have often compared the film to Rivette and Godard, and there is a Godardian ambivalence towards conventionality in not only the film’s narrative structure, but in the depiction of the students, who cannot help but recall Pierrot le Fou. To this reviewer there was also a hint of Andy Warhol about it. It’s not so much in terms of any sort of minimalism, but in the way Yoshida experiments with the size and shape of not the frame, per se, but the eye-line. He doesn’t go as far as Warhol did in The Chelsea Girls, stopping short of running two frames side by side with conversations inaudibly overlapping, but he makes a point to separate his characters, in some way or another, from another part of the frame, thereby isolating them, either in the perspective of a receding passageway or split by the positioning of an inanimate object deliberately on the screen – a wall, a banister rail, a column.

Equally radical is the way Yoshida and Hasegawa light the film. For the scenes which take place indoors, the light coming through the windows or from the skies beyond is often bright white, as if the scene has deliberately been overexposed. It lends the film an almost nuclear apocalyptic feel, which considering the stills of the 1923 quake and the political climate of the late sixties may not be coincidental. The very title evokes the pitting of love against death, and the notion is carried forward onto multiple levels, with characters considering, discussing and attempting suicide, murder and, of course, sex. We’re not out of the first reel and the young female student is masturbating while in the shower, pressing herself against the door, her genitals obscured on most prints in typical Japanese fashion. Indeed, the first time we see her, she’s lying naked on the bed, allowing one man to literally kiss her all over, while her partner casually comes into the next room and waits for them to finish. It’s in the point of view of these characters, even more than Osugi, that Yoshida’s point lies. The predisposition towards immolation, with the girl first attempting to burn strips of film with a lighter, then literally starting a fire with said lighter, her tights and some petrol, and she and her lover using it as foreplay to begin their latest sexual encounter. Some might regard it, to quote the film, as mental masturbation, and on one level it is, but of the most challenging kind. With its constant references to suicide, one might almost see the film as the suicide note of traditional Japanese film-making, but it seems more appropriate to call it its death warrant.

44 Responses

Well, Sam was right…this certainly is a surprise! Out of curiosity, though, if there are no English subs, were you unable to follow the dialogue – or do you speak French (or Japanese)? Or did you manage to catch a screening translated into English?

I have an English subbed copy, my DVD notations refer to sell-thru DVDs, not my own…I have written pieces on numerous films that aren’t on English friendly DVD.

Mine’s a riff of the French DVD with Eng subs digitally added. I only got the extended version in the last few weeks, which raised the film from around 8 or 9 to no 1. Sam has still only seen the shorter version.

I see; just wondering, as this would have to be one hell of a film to wind up #1 without access to the dialogue (though apparently it is one hell of a film). Did the film rise to #1 after you had already initiated your countdown, or just before? If after, I love that kind of stuff (I suspect I will be doing the same with my own previously-mentioned greatest favorites list, if I can get it off the ground…), riding by the seat of your pants.

Great and fascinating list; I really enjoyed this exercise, and I’m looking forward to the Seventies!

(P.S. Sam you can link up to/sidebar my Dancing Image post now, should you so wish…)

(Additional P.S.: I eliminated some of the extraneous prose, about what would be #1, about if Persona would appear on the list, which now could seem “dated” – the post should be able to serve as an all-purpose, all-time guide to Allan’s countdowns.)

It’s one I haven’t seen, another instance where Allan has given me another film to add to the list of those that I need to try and track down and watch. I agree that the countdown has been great… I wandered over here about midway through and have enjoyed it the rest of the way. Like MovieMan, it’s inspired me to do something of a “countdown” of my own on my young blog (not lists like this, just picking yearly favorites).

Well, folks it’s true I have only seen the shorter version. As soon as I get the longer version from Allan I will send copies to both Movie Man and Dave and others. I give Allan a lot of credit for this eclectic, but superlative choice, and perhaps the longer version will elevate it for me as well.

Movie man, I am at school now, but I will have a long break early this afternoon, so I’ll negotiate the link up.

Though I’ve said I don’t need any more movies to watch for the moment, I might make an exception for this (long version). But I have to make sure my computer can still play a R2 disc (after about 5 switches back and forth, it locks into one region, and I think I may have used all my switches a few years back). That would be the only way I could watch it now – unless you can switch regions by burning or something (don’t think that’s the case, but I’ve never tried it). Anyway, thanks for the offer – and at any rate, I will hopefully have a multi-region player by the end of the year which should render this conversation moot.

Since I love list statistics, and because I had time on my hands as I waited for multiple pictures to upload for my next blog post, I compiled a list of which countries were most featured on Allan’s 60s list.

At the top are the USA & France in a tie for 10, but with the edge going to France because 4 of the US’s films are co-productions, while France only has 1.

Japan follows with 7 movies; Italy has 7 too, though 2 are co-productions. Spain was featured 4 times (with 1 co-production), Czechoslovakia and the UK thrice (the UK had 1 co-production), Sweden, the Soviet Union, and Brazil twice, and one film each was featured from Mexico, Argentina, India, Iran, Algeria (1 co-production), and Hungary.

OK, useless info quota filled for the day – hope you enjoyed (I was curious about films from given directors, but Allan varied it up enough that such a list would be too long and balanced).

You are not the only one who loves to document country breakdowns. Allan himself (as per his unpublished book, which contains all these reviews) always provides country breakdowns, and he will be most pleased you provided the info on this decade.

Of course, needless to say, this will be the only decade where American cinema does not have the clear edge in numbers. But I am hardly surprised as the 60’s ushed in foreign-cinema, and many of teh greats were at their peak…i.e. Bergman, Antonioni, Fellini, Bresson, Godard, Bunuel, Yoshida (a nod to EROS), Shindo, Kobayashi, Kurosawa (not a peak decade for him, but still working), Ray, Malle, etc….

wow, after looking over the master list 2-100, i was betting on either a Teshigahara (WOMAN IN THE DUNES or A FACE OF ANOTHER) or Rohmer’s MY NIGHT AT MAUDS. you really fooled me. this is a great (and deserving) number one. can’t wait for the 70’s now– a decade i like as much as the 60’s.

Jamie this is terrific, what you provide here and all I can say is THANK YOU! I personally own the shorter version (and have seen it–yes it’s great!) but Allan will soon be sending me the longer version, which is the one featured here on this link, correct?

I would never delete this! This is a stellar public service for all cineastes!

In Sam’s case you’re talking to the biggest computer illiterate on the planet. He has to get his wife to plug anything in for him that has a lead.

He still refuses to type his reviews in Word – he refuses to understand what Word is – preferring to send them to me in AOL email for me to reformat and do my nut in with prior to posting. I asked him to open something up on in Word and all he’ll say, calling his long suffering wife, is “hey, Lu!!! Come down here!”

pretty funny. but not knowing your ages (though i know sam is older) i can understand. my father is pretty backwards to all this stuff.

in short, if you can’t figure it out ask me, or i’ll burn you a copy and send it to you. you may have to watch it on your computer though, it doesn’t work in my dvd player (but i assume that is because it’s a region one player), my mac is multi.

Weird, Jamie coz those vob files should work in a US DVD player. Have you tried burning in region zero? There’s also technology you can use to break any regioned dvd, rip it, and re-burn as a region zero.

Then there’s also xvid files, which are all over the web for the picking. Those don’t work in DVD players, but they do in ps3’s (that’s the only reason I bought one, in fact).

Seriously, though, knowing how to navigate the xvid thicket of the internet is essential for the new cinephile. So far I’ve gotten “El Verdugo,” “Celine and Julie Go Boating,” and a handful of others this way. If you know what you’re doing the sky is the limit.

Yeah Jon I’m not sure what the problem is to playing on a ‘standard’ dvd player, but I don’t know the settings for whomever ripped it originally, so i can’t be sure. I do know it plays on my computer’s dvd player so it’s probably an initial start up file is missing (all dvd encoding issues). i had a similar problem with the DILLINGER IS DEAD i found. plays on my computer, but not on tv. oh well.

congrats on CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING, which fyi was released on region 1 by New Yorker a few years back. not sure about it’s current availability as they just went out of business. i await the ‘best of 90’s list’ to talk about LA BELLE NOISEUSE, one of my personal favorites (speaking of Rivette).

but i agree, about this ‘new hunting’ for the cinephile, i just watched a non-english VHS rip of THE STRANGER (d: Visconti). i couldn’t tell what they were saying, but knowing the book very well was almost enough (plus Anna Karina works in ANY language). also Godard’s great KING LEAR was recently found.

also Allan let me be another to wish you a very happy birthday. what’s on tap for the birthday? perhaps the slasher HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME (you could do worse in the genre)?

“The masterpiece of Yoshida Yoshishige is Erosu + Gyakusatsu (Eros Plus Massacre). Few films in the Western cinema are as freely disjunctive and as dialectical in their approach to narrative space-time. The mythical space-time of Teshigahara, in contrast, simply tends to dissolve chronology along with the historical
dimension as such. This film offers, moreover, a remarkable reading of the new theatricality, memorable embodiments of the archetypal «madman», as well as an empirical but provocative use of strategies borrowed from traditional art, notably the principle of de-centred composition. These are allied with more directly Brechtian procedures, such as theatricalized interpolations, title boards, mixtures of historical fact and fiction, past and present, etc. The films length precludes a full-scale analysis. It is a three-and-a-half-hour fantasmagoria around the life and death of a noted Japanese anarchist, Ôsugi Sakae, killed by the police with one of his lovers and his nephew early in this century.”

“In Yoshishige Yoshida’s Eros plus Massacre (1969) fiction and fact, present and past confront, collide, intermingle, and illuminate each other. Aptly called a “phantasmagoria”, Eros intertwines the “true” story from 1916-23 of Anarchists and Free Love-espousers Sakae Osugi, Noe Ito and their circle, and the fictional tale of Eiko, a contemporary young woman engaged in Free Love explorations of her own, as she researches the ideas and lives of Ito and Osugi. In keeping with her pursuits, she has a circle as well, this one all-male, including Wada, a young pyromaniac, Unema, a suicidal film director, and Hinoshiro, who claims to be a police detective investigating her supposed involvement in a prostitution ring.
These various strands intertwine in a manner that ranks among the most oblique narrative styles in cinema history, betraying an on-going artistic dialogue not only with Yoshida’s fellow members of the Japanese New Wave, but also the leading luminaries of European art cinema, such as Antonioni, Resnais, and Godard (especially Weekend and Le Gai savoir), as well as the Truffaut of Jules et Jim. Critical discussions of Eros are often at pains to determine just whose narrative the film is: that of Eiko and her various men, or perhaps Ito? The on-screen evidence to ultimately determine the solution to this issue is slim, but arguably Yoshida is less concerned with character perspective than with all the characters collectively serving as stand-ins for modern Japan, which he anthropomorphically subjects to a form of Reichian Character Analysis, in which “a person’s entire character, not only individual symptoms, can be looked at and treated as a neurotic phenomenon.” In this reading, the film’s characters from both past and present mirror each other like facets of a single psyche, as well as represent the various aspects of the Japanese character as it transitions through the modern age. Yoshida sees the political and erotic world of late-60’s Japan as a direct development of experiments attempted in the 10’s and 20’s. To diagnose Japan’s neurosis, it’s necessary to interrogate the past, and, as in a dream of a survivor of trauma, to intuitively ruminate on the cause, consequence, and meaning of debilitating events — recreating their origins, reforming motivation and action, remolding outcomes, until the key to liberation slips into place.
Yoshida, with Nagisa Oshima, shared not only the interest in psychoanalysis alluded to above (though they tended to be a bit wary of its application to the Japanese context), but were also members of a small coterie of independent directors who had taken to dealing with their Marxism explicitly in their work. (The title Eros plus Massacre, in fact, alludes to an earlier attempt to blend Marx and Freud, Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization.) Unlike the vast majority of Oshima’s work, however, Yoshida’s films fell squarely into the feminisuto (a term derived from the Japanese pronunciation of the English word feminist) camp of Mizoguchi, Imamura, etc. Tadao Sato describes the feminisuto perspective thusly: “The image of a woman suffering uncomplainingly can imbue us with admiration for a virtuous existence almost beyond our reach, rich in endurance and courage. One can idealize her rather than merely pity her, and this can lead to what I call the worship of womanhood, a special Japanese brand of feminism.” By 1969, Yoshida had created a major body of feminisuto work in collaboration with his wife, Mariko Okada, the greatest star of the Japanese New Wave (she plays Noe Ito in Eros), to which Eros served as the thematic and stylistic climax. In their series of films, the skewed world-view embodied by Yoshida’s famously radically de-centered compositions and fractured narrative strategies is brought into emotional balance by images of the idealized characters played by his wife, who functions as the alluring anima, leading the wandering hero out of his solipsistic maze. (Appropriate to the Freudian-informed Eros, this lure often leads to a bringing to consciousness of the death-wish, though one more in the manner intrinsic to traditional Japanese culture than Freud’s Thanatos.)
Yoshida’s Osugi is seen in this Marxian/feminasuto light. Despite an unusual adherence by a filmmaker to factual detail, Yoshida has “his” Osugi evolve to a position diametrically opposed to the historical one — rather than liberation coming from an on-going process of inward-looking self-development, liberation is from the solipsistic self. Human freedom is seen as possible only when self-development is in a constant state of evolution in relationship to others.
The dramatic style of Eros evinces what Noel Burch describes as a “remarkable reading of the new theatricality” of the 1960’s. Yoshida discovers a tone and purpose balanced somewhere between Brecht and Artaud. Through distancing techniques, rational perception and judgment are engaged. Thereupon we are bowled over by the film’s ecstatic beauty. Immediately afterwards, the viewer’s sensibility is forced through a sieve of agonized absurdism, leading him or her
along a series of multiple-catharsis inducing experiences akin to Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. In actuality, all these elements occur simultaneously, adding up to what might be called the Cinema of Apocalypse, in which our consciousness, and perhaps even the nature of our being are challenged to evolve by this cinematic experience.
Appropriate to an Apocalyptic Cinema, in Eros plus Massacre, cinema itself is brought into question as a mode of perception keeping the solipsistic male locked in his bubble, and to enact what Yoshida sees as a necessary change in human consciousness may, in fact, involve the death of cinema itself.”

“fact, present and past confront, collide, intermingle, and illuminate each other. Aptly called a “phantasmagoria… the death of cinema itself”

These ideas triggered a connection in my mind with the early surrealists, which may be worth sharing. James Naremore, in his foreword to the English transalation of the seminal, A Panorama of American Film Noir 1941-1953 by Frenchmen Borde and Chaumeton (2002), relates a fascinating insight by the translator of the book, Paul Hammond:

“The best account of the Surrealist fascination with cinema as a whole can be found in Paul Hammond’s witty, perceptive introduction to The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema, a revised edition of which was published by City Lights Books in 2000. Hammond, who is also the translator of this edition of Panorama, reminds us that during the years immediately after the First World War, the original Surrealists used movies as an instrument for the overthrow of bourgeois taste and the desublimatlon of everyday life. Engaging in what Hammond describes as ‘an extremely Romantic project’ and an ‘inspired salvage operation’, [Andre] Breton and his associates would randomly pop in and out of fleapit theaters for brief periods of time, sampling the imagery and writing lyrical essays about their experiences. Like everyone in the historical avant-garde, they were captivated by modernity, but they particularly relished the cinema because it was so productive of the ‘marvelous’ and so like a waking dream. Willfully disrupting narrative continuities, they savored the cinematic mise-en-scene, which functioned as a springboard for their poetic imagination; and out of the practice they developed what Louis Aragon called a ‘synthetic’ criticism designed to emphasize the latent, often libidinal implications of individual shots or short scenes. Even when cinema became too expensive for Breton’s style of serial viewing, it remained the fetishistic medium par excellence. At certain moments, even in ordinary genre films or grade-B productions. It could involuntarily throw off bizarre images, strange juxtapositions, and erotic plays of light and shadow on human bodies, thus providing an opportunity for the audience to break free of repressive plot conventions and indulge in private fantasies.”

So in a sense in Eros + Massacre there is rather than the death of cimema a rebirth.

It will surprise no-one that I am particularly struck with this remark: “Even when cinema became too expensive for Breton’s style of serial viewing, it remained the fetishistic medium par excellence. At certain moments, even in ordinary genre films or grade-B productions.” I think this yet another serious riposte to the exclusivist position, and if I may be permitted the presumption, gives support to my recent post and comments on The Art of the B.

I am going to bbe late for school now, but it was worth it to read through these superb and stimulating analytical pieces, which expand the literature on this most unique and endlessly-fascinating film.

It’s more than a starter course too for those wanting to enrich their experience!!!

I finally watched this tonight. It was quite an experience, but I have not really digested it as of now. My initial impression is that I was rather enthralled by many of the early passages (while finding Yoshida’s “off-center” – which is putting it way too mildly! – compositions visually frustrating) but my interest tapered off as the film wore on and the claustrophia of the lovers’ quarrels took over the movie. The comparison to Jules et Jim in Tony’s quote is telling – that’s another movie which wins me over in its passionate early phases and then wearies me as the menage a trois becomes endless and nightmarish. Which, of course, is most likely part of the point, but can make for a frustrating viewing experience. At any rate, I do see my taste differs somewhat from Allan’s in his top choices: he likes his films a little more astringent than I do; neither Contempt nor Shame would be in my top Godards and Bergmans, respectively, though I recognize their greatness.

As for Eros + Massacre, I would like to look into the background of its history & context as there are so many “off-screen” elements that could enrich and deepen the film (though it is interesting enough without quite knowing what’s going on, which is as it should be!). I certainly plan on watching this again. Thanks, Allan and Sam, for introducing me to this work!

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Wonders in the Dark is a blog dedicated to the arts, especially film, theatre and music. An open forum is highly encouraged, as the site proctors are usually ready and able to engage with ongoing conversation.